Welcome to our look at the finale of Bodies, the British Netflix miniseries based on the Vertigo comic of the same name by the late Si Spencer, Meghan Hetrick, Dean Ormston, Tula Lotay, and Phil Winslade. For those who’ve missed our weekly looks in Boomb Tube, it’s been a compellingly intricate drama, that slowly but surely revealed the decades-spanning time travel conspiracy at its center. And now, the time has literally come for it to end. Spoilers…
1. Ripple Effect
Iris arrives naked, paralyzed and afraid in the 1800s, too late to stop Hillinghead from framing himself for the murder on Longharvest Lane (the crime she’s responsible for), but fortunately, she’s incarcerated next to his cell, where she’s able to persuade him about the truth. As a result, Mannix becomes shaken when Alfred reveals he knows who he really is before his murder, disrupting his marriage to Polly, who thoroughly resents him by 1941. Remorseful, Mannix makes a secret recording for Weissman to pass to Hasan and his younger self, a message that Karl goes out in a blaze of glory hiding, instead of his pathetic previous fate.
Hasan winds up having to use the Throat to retrieve the recording before it’s destroyed in 2023, which felt a little convenient given how much Iris had to go through to reach Alfred in 1890, but I suppose this being a time travel show, there was no way they would not have one of the leads appear with themselves. It was certainly better than if Iris’s duplicates had led Hasan to Weissman’s gift in 1941 and 2023, reinforcing the image of a diverse, multicultural London working in tandem together to prevent a tragedy, instead of having one character manipulate history like Mannix did.
2. Don’t Forget the Cause of Crime
Part of me wondered why Old Hasan didn’t go back to 2023 in the first place, and simply undo the loop there and then. As cold as she was towards his older self, she was never going to kill Elias when he was a troubled teen, and the elderly version’s confession provided her with the perfect way to break his programming, as well as the proof she needed to persuade his mother to reconcile with him. I noted in our look at the first episode that the series emphasized how policing causes law enforcement to become estranged from the communities they’re supposed to serve, and this similarly shows how police should be compassionate and empathetic, not dismissive and antagonistic like Barber (who turned out to have designs for a police state, funnily enough.)
3. She Who Remains
Elias and his ancestors/descendants vanish once his explosive genesis is prevented, although our leads remember their experiences, even after the timeline resets. (It’s more ambiguous with Weissman and Hillinghead, but clear that the latter’s memories have made him a more empathetic and kind officer.) From what little I understand about theoretical physics, based on being a James Cameron (and ex-Bryan Singer) fan, this is consistent with the idea of observation determining which timeline is real (ala the ending of X-Men: Days of Future Past), meaning remnants from dissolved futures can still exist if in the present (eg. the Skynet Terminators etc. in Dark Fate.)
So with all that said, it’s a little perplexing that Iris (every version of her) remains in the past and future, but Defoe’s bod(ies), the catalyst for them undoing the loop, don’t remain to be found by Hasan, Hillinghead et al. That’s good, the last thing anyone has to deal with (least of all him in his bright new future) are his corpses appearing randomly, especially as the trail explaining their presence now no longer exists, but still, it does make me cross-eyed. I just think there needed to be some consistency: either everything that ended the loop remained, or it vanished along with Mannix and his legacy – if you needed an epilogue for Iris, show her in the new future.
4. An Uncertain Future
The show ends on a very happy note, the loss of Mannix’s younger self aside, with everyone else now living out the rest of their lives, free of the conspiracy that destroyed or corrupted them. It is bittersweet though: Hillinghead will remain a closeted bisexual man, with Ashe unaware of how much he sacrificed for him, and likewise Esther will never know the extent to which Weissman cared about her. Iris also has to live in three different time periods without her artificial spine, although given how long it took her to see the light, one might consider that somewhat fair. There’s also the uncertainty of our real future; it was kind’ve nice knowing Britain would be at least exist in the future thanks to Harker, because god knows if anyone else was preparing against climate change in the 19th century.
Continued below5. The Elephant in the Room
One of my favorite TV shows, if not my favorite of all time, is Netflix’s Dark, the streamer’s first German original series, which I covered as part of our 2020 Summer TV Binge. Bodies and Dark are very similar series, although it feels unfair to compare them, since this was only eight episodes, and Dark ran for three seasons. However, what gives me pause is finding out how different “Bodies” (the comic) is from the show. No spoilers for the book (although I will say giving Gabriel Defoe that name was very sly), but I’ve come away feeling someone retooled the TV version to be Dark‘s British counterpart.
That’s not to say Bodies is bad or a waste of time, it’s an excellent series that doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it’s odd that its story is more similar to Dark than its source material, and that the comic’s weirder, more unique one wasn’t what was realized on screen. Regardless, it’s great more people will start reading the book because of the show: I hope Si Spencer is up there somewhere, smiling, knowing that, and that his friends, colleagues and any family he may have will hopefully reap the rewards, even if readers are in for quite a shock (I know I was.)
I hope he knows he is loved.
